‘Heroic, sexy and a warrior bravado’: how Adam and the Ants redefined pop | Music | The Guardian The G2 interview ‘Heroic, sexy and a warrior bravado’: how Adam and the Ants redefined pop They were a riot of makeup, feathers, tribal drums and surf guitars – and, for a spectacular moment, they became the biggest band in the UK. Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni tell the story of their breakthrough King of the wild frontier: Adam Ant, complete with Apache war stripe Thursday 26 May 2016 11.52 EDT Last modified on Friday 16 September 2016 11.40 EDT Share on Messenger Close On the morning of 17 October 1980, Adam Ant discovered he couldn’t go to the corner shop. Or, at least, he couldn’t go to the corner shop without attracting attention: “[There was] pointing, girls chasing us down the street, and all the rest of it.” He was nearly 27 years old and had become a pop star literally overnight. The previous evening, Adam and the Ants had appeared on Top of the Pops for the first time.

Their single, Dog Eat Dog , wasn’t really high enough in the charts to warrant a slot on the biggest pop show on British TV. (It had scraped into the Top 40 at No 37 – a distinct improvement on anything Adam and the Ants had achieved in the previous three years of their career, but hardly a seismic eruption to trouble the artists that hogged the top of charts: the Police , Madness or Ottowan, with the deathless D.I.S.C.O. ) Nor had the media shown much interest. “If we’d got played on the radio, you’d soon have known about it, but I can’t recall anyone actually playing it,” Ant says. “We weren’t getting a lot of joy at Radio 1.” Still, another artist had dropped out of the show at the last minute and the Ants’ TV plugger had somehow secured them a booking. It was, says Marco Pirroni – the band’s guitarist and Adam’s songwriting partner – the moment they had been waiting for. “I was totally a child of the glam era. I basically consider glam rock to be the pinnacle of all human achievement.

I’d seen Bowie doing Starman and Roxy Music on Top of the Pops and, in the back of my mind, that’s exactly what I wanted to achieve. You wanted to cause that argument in the playground the next day.” I know for a fact that Pirroni got his wish. I was nine years old the night of that performance. I’ve said before that it more or less changed my life : certainly, it was the moment that sold me on pop music to the exclusion of almost everything else a nine-year-old boy might be interested in. And at school the next day, there were arguments. Some of us thought it was the greatest thing we’d ever seen; better even than Star Wars . Others were profoundly unconvinced, voicing the opinion that because Adam Ant was wearing makeup, he was a “gaylord” (an insult that baffled me at the time and baffles me still, based as it apparently was on the quaint but erroneous notion that homosexuals organise themselves along some kind of feudal system). Clearly, similar exchanges were happening in playgrounds up and down the country. The following week, Dog Eat Dog was No 19 in the charts, then No 4 the week after.

By new year – when its follow-up, Antmusic , was released and the Kings of the Wild Frontier album deposed Abba’s Super Trouper from the top of the charts – Adam and the Ants were unequivocally the biggest pop band in the UK, a position they would occupy for the next 18 months (at one dizzying juncture in 1981, they had seven singles in the Top 40 at once). Such was the appetite for all things Ant, that their old label started chucking old singles. Whether or not the fans liked them, they were hits, too: the 1978 single Young Parisians reached No 9 on the back of Kings of the Wild Frontier’s success. Pinterest Ant music: Marco Pirroni, Adam Ant and Gary Tibbs.

Photograph: Alamy Now, 35 years on, Adam and the Ants’ brief but spectacular reign is so esconsced as part of British pop history (no documentary about the 80s is complete without footage of their frontman jumping through a window in the video for the chart-topping Stand and Deliver ; Kings of the Wild Frontier has just received the deluxe box-set treatment) that it’s easy to forget what an entirely bizarre, improbable state of affairs it was. They may well be the weirdest band ever to achieve vast success of the screaming-teens and appearances-on-the-Multi-Coloured-Swap-Shop variety. For one thing, there was the matter of how Adam and the Ants sounded. They very occasionally wrote bright pop melodies, but for the most part, they made music that was brooding and dark, a relentless battery of drums, topped off with twanging surf guitar, feedback and inexplicable yelps and howls. In his post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again , writer Simon Reynolds called 1981’s Prince Charming “one of the strangest hit singles ever made”, and he has a point.

It opens with a chorus of screams, its beat a lurching, funereal thud ... It spent four weeks at No 1. Then there were the lyrics. Adam and the Ants are remembered as a band that sang about pirates and highwaymen – which is weird enough in itself, but I suppose might account for at least some of their appeal to a nine-year-old boy – or who unplugged the jukebox and did us all a favour. In an update of Marc Bolan ’s pouting braggadocio, Adam and the Ants were always big on telling you how amazing Adam and the Ants were, and how terrible everyone else was: “Like a boxer before a fight,” says Ant today. “You’ve got to have that element of bravado, of narcissism, of belief.” Yet other songs referenced the transgressive playwright Joe Orton , or offered up chanted lists of Native American tribes in lieu of lyrics. Flip over their hit singles and you almost invariably found songs about sexual fetishism, sadomasochism, the erotic thrill of being tattooed.

Among the extras on the Kings of the Wild Frontier box set, there’s an astonishing clip of Adam and the Ants at the height of their teenybopper fame, favouring their audience with a lurid, filthy, snail’s-pace song about rough sex called Physical (You’re So) . It’s hard to watch without boggling a bit: not least at the fact that, a few weeks after it was recorded, the same band appeared on the Children’s Royal Variety Performance. Furthermore, at the start of 1980, no one in their right mind would have picked Adam Ant as a major pop star in waiting. For one thing, the band were deeply unfashionable minor players in the post-punk world: their 1979 debut album Dirk Wears White Sox had been filled with deeply odd, spindly sounding songs that ruminated on Hitler and the size of God’s penis. They had a devoted following – “the ongoing bit of that punk subculture, mohican haircuts and all that, people hanging on to punk,” as Pirroni puts it – but the music press had loathed them from the start, deriding them as punk arrivistes with a dubious line in lyrics.

“They hated us. Hated the S&M imagery, hated the fact that I was doing stuff about the rubber world, things influenced by [controversial artist] Allen Jones ,” Ant says. “It was quite humorous, but they didn’t get the joke.” In addition, since January 1980, Adam and the Ants had ceased to exist in all but name – Adam’s erstwhile manager Malcolm McLaren having quit after a few months and taken all the other band members with him to form Bow Wow Wow . “It was a mutiny,” Ant says. “I wasn’t motivated by revenge, but the humiliation and the shock of it sort of put me into a gear where I thought: ‘OK, you’ve said your piece, now I’m going to get on with it.’” McLaren had at least left him with a couple of ideas. One was that pop music was currently lacking a teen idol – the big new movement, Two Tone , clearly wasn’t there for teenagers to scream at – and that Ant might fit the bill.

“He didn’t think much of me as a singer, but he said: ‘You’ve got muscles and you look all right, your face should be on the cover.’” The other was a compilation cassette, featuring the 1971 novelty hit Burundi Black , on which the French musician Michel Bernholc played over an old recording of drummers from Burundi’s musical ensemble Ingoma Tribe. The latter had inspired Ant to start seeking out “all these traditional ethnic albums – hours and hours of tribal music and people grunting and whooping, different ways of using the voice. I wanted to use my voice like an instrument, like a battering ram.” Ant took both ideas to Pirroni, a former punk face – he had played with Siouxsie and the Banshees at the famous 100 Club punk festival in 1976 – who had recently quit as guitarist of 4AD-signed band Rema-Rema . “I hated post-punk, even though I was in a post-punk band. Actually, I hated the band I was in,” says Pirroni. “And I hated Adam and the Ants, Dirk Wears White Sox, all that bollocks.

Scritti Politti, gigs at the Acklam Hall, I hated it all. [It was] not as good as it thought it was, not as clever as it thought it was … banging on about credibility, going on Top of the Pops and acting like you’re embarrassed to be there. If you’re going to be a band, do it properly – you go on Top of the Pops, sell records, make a lot of money, have big cars. Don’t fuck about acting like you’re embarrassed.” If Ant’s notion of pop music based around African drumming and the grunting and whooping he had found on his anthropological albums was peculiar, Pirroni’s embellishments made it more peculiar still. “John Barry, Duane Eddy, the Shadows,” he says. “We didn’t sit around thinking: ‘Wow, this is a recipe for success.’ It’s just not, is it? We weren’t really sure what we were doing.

There was this South African musical called Ipi Tombi on in the West End at the time and, at one point, Adam had this idea that we should get the drummers from that.” Instead, the new lineup featured two drummers, an idea Ant says he stole from James Brown. One of them, Chris “Merrick” Hughes, fortuitously turned out to be a record producer. Their sound was further augmented in the studio by kettle drums and the banging of guitar cases, pieces of wood, doors and walls to achieve “an enormous barrage of percussion”. The new members found themselves not just required to play, but to dress in Ant’s new image: a riot of feathers, scarves, makeup and hand-made shirts. “It was all the things I’d grown up with that I felt were heroic and sexy and had a warrior bravado to them,” Ant says. “I’d been reading about and studying pirates and the Native Americans for a few years – the Native American thing was as close to a religion as I had. Putting the Apache war stripe across my nose was a declaration of arms against the music industry, which I felt had ignored me and treated me very unfairly.

I wanted to look like a buccaneer: when they raided somewhere, they would take all the stuff they could carry or wear and not take anything else. And then I got the Hussar jacket, the one worn by the 11th Hussars in the Charge of the Light Brigade . They were the most ridiculed regiment in the British army because they were thought to be too well dressed. People called them “the Cherrybums”, because their uniforms were so tight, and all the young ladies came out to look at them when they were on parade. They were despised by the rest of the army, but they did this heroic, disastrous thing.” Adam Ant review – 'The years simply fall away' Read more In spring 1980, suitably decked out, the new Adam and the Ants went on tour, playing some of their old songs to mollify long-term fans. Some gigs were triumphant; others, including a show in Huddersfield, descended into violence.

“From what I can remember,” says Pirroni, “the main reaction I could see was sort of open-mouthed.” They signed a publishing deal, which led to a contract with CBS Records – although, Pirroni claims, not without a struggle. “It was so hard to explain to A&R men who wanted to toe the NME line. You’d go: ‘Look, you know pop groups, you must have seen this – pop groups have gold discs, they have money, they have the best clothes, they have model girlfriends, big cars, it’s that.’ ‘No, not getting it.’ ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake …’ It was absolutely going against everything that was happening at the time, which was what appealed to me.” Whether it would appeal to anyone else initially seemed a moot point – released in July 1980, the first single from the album of the same name, Kings of the Wild Frontier, struggled to No 48, then vanished.

Perhaps this had something to do with a lack of coverage and radio play, or perhaps it was the fact that the new Adam and the Ants had chosen to open their account with one of their least commercial songs – essentially three minutes of thunderous drums, white noise and shouting, held together with a solitary echoing guitar riff – as “an orchestrated call to arms”. Then came Dog Eat Dog and Top of the Pops; in its wake, Kings of the Wild Frontier went back up the charts. By March 1981, three minutes of thunderous drums, white noise and shouting was at No 2. One year and one album later – Prince Charming (which contained a No 3 single and two chart-toppers) had gone platinum – Adam and the Ants had broken up. Bassist Kevin Mooney was the first to leave, as mortified by pop success as Ant and Pirroni were delighted (“I literally used to rack my brains to think of stuff that the NME would hate,” laughs the latter. “Panto. They’ll hate panto. We should make it more panto!”).

Adam and Marco’s songwriting partnership endured until the late 90s; they had more hits, but nothing that quite matched Adam and the Ants’ imperial phase. Then again, nor has anyone else: British pop music has done many things in the ensuing decades, but it has never produced anything remotely like Adam and the Ants. If anything, their brief reign looks more extraordinary and peculiar 35 years on than it did then, viewed now on BBC4 through their near-constant appearances on repeats of 1981’s Top of the Pops. “It had an energy of its own and a feel of its own,” says Ant, currently on tour playing the Kings of the Wild Frontier album. “I think it was done on my own terms. I certainly feel that I didn’t compromise in any way, shape or form – musically or visually. And the public grabbed hold of it. I think it was quite easy for kids to adapt the look; it didn’t cost them a lot of money. And I think it went hand in hand with that Smash Hits era, when it wasn’t so much about what was written in the article, but about ripping it out and sticking it on the wall.

That hadn’t really happened since T Rex , so it was a return to that. A return to pop,” he says. And then – perhaps considering the stuff about the 11th Hussars and fetishism and the Ingoma Tribe and Joe Orton and 17th-century piracy – he qualifies himself. “Well, kind of pop. If you know what I mean.” • Adam Ant performs Kings of the Wild Frontier on tour around the UK until 10 June. For more information, visit: adam-ant.net . The super deluxe box set of Kings of the Wild Frontier is available now on Sony. Adam Ant | Download Music, Tour Dates & Video | eMusic Biography All Music Guide All Music Guide: One of the seminal figures of new wave, Adam Ant (born Stuart Leslie Goddard) had several distinct phases to his career. Initially, he explored a jagged, guitar-oriented post-punk with his group Adam and the Ants before giving way to a more pop-oriented, glam-tinged musical direction that brought him to the top of the charts. After that had run its course, he refashioned himself as a mainstream singer, which enabled him to stretch his career out for a couple of years.

Once it seemed that his musical career had evaporated, he made an unexpected comeback in the early '90s as an adult alternative artist. During all this time, he recorded several great pop singles and had a surprisingly large impact on alternative rock. Adam Ant formed Adam and the Ants with guitarist Lester Square, bassist Andy Warren, and drummer Paul Flanagan in London in 1977. The group's approach was more theatrical than most punk groups, incorporating sadomasochistic imagery into their concerts. During this time, the group's lineup was fairly unstable, with Square being replaced by Mark Gaumont. The band released their debut, Dirk Wears White Sox, on the independent label Do It in 1979.

Dirk was an ambitious and somewhat dark album, filled with jerky rhythms and angular guitar riffs, and elements of glam rock crept into Adam's vocals; Adam re-acquired the rights to the record in 1983, reissuing it in a resequenced and remixed form, with the tracks "Catholic Day" and "Day I Met God" replaced by "Zerox" and "Kick," as well as including a new version of "Cartrouble." At the time of its release, Dirk Wears White Sox wasn't a critical or commercial success, and the band felt the need to rework their image. Ant hired Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, to help redefine them. McLaren dressed the band in pirate outfits and suggested a more accessible and pop-oriented, rhythmic variation on punk. Adam and the Ants followed his advice, preparing material for a new album. However, McLaren persuaded all of the Ants to leave Adam, using them as the core members of Bow Wow Wow. Adam Ant immediately formed a new version of the Ants, adding guitarist Marco Pirroni, bassist Kevin Mooney, and drummers Terry Lee Miall and Merrick (born Chris Hughes).

Pirroni, in particular, became very important in the band's musical direction, co-writing the majority of the songs with Adam, thus beginning a collaboration between the duo that would continue into the '90s. Driven by a relentless, driving beat and chanting melodies, the new band's first album, 1980's Kings of the Wild Frontier, became an enormous hit in the U.K., launching three Top Ten hit singles, including the number two "Ant Music." The band's success was helped by a series of visually enticing videos, prominently featuring the skinny, handsome Adam Ant decked out in pirate gear. Prince Charming, released the following year, retained the same formula as Kings of the Wild Frontier, spawning two number one singles, "Stand and Deliver" and "Prince Charming." Even though the album was a commercial success, the formula was beginning to wear thin. After Prince Charming, Adam Ant ditched the Ants for a solo career, retaining Marco Pirroni as a songwriting collaborator and a supporting musician. Adam's first solo album, Friend or Foe, was released in 1982 and featured the number one single "Goody Two Shoes" and the Top Ten title track.

Although his next album, 1983's Strip, had some highlights and hit singles, it marked the end of his reign as one of Britain's top pop stars. Released in 1985, the Tony Visconti-produced Vive le Rock had some fun moments, but the performance was too studied and the record didn't earn any hit singles, so Adam Ant pursued a surprisingly successful career in acting. In 1990, Ant made a comeback with the catchy hit single "Room at the Top" from the Manners & Physique record, but the album failed to produce another hit single. For the next five years, Ant concentrated on acting. By the time Adam Ant returned to recording in 1995, echoes of his music could be heard in the spiky singles of Elastica, the neo-goth industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails, and the pseudo-glam of Suede. Instead of capitalizing on the burgeoning new wave revival, Adam Ant's 1995 comeback, Wonderful, had little to do with the stylish, intensely rhythmic music he made in the early '80s.

Instead, the album repositioned him as a more mature pop-rocker, with crafted songs that featured acoustic guitars as prominently as electrics. The album was a moderate hit in the U.S. and the U.K., as was the single "Wonderful." Following the promo push for Wonderful, Adam Ant and Pirroni attempted to write a new clutch of songs but no finished album came of it, nor did anything surface from various sessions over the next few years. Instead, the rarities-studded retrospective Antbox appeared in 2000. Ant continued his attempts to launch new projects -- including a collaboration with Morrissey guitarist Boz Boorer, who did appear on Wonderful -- but he also suffered from erratic behavior, resulting in several arrests between 2002 and 2003, leading to a period of hospitalization for mental health (he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder). A further round of reissues arrived in the mid-2000s, this time expanded double-discs of his first six albums, all containing a second disc with rarities, B-sides, and unreleased material.

At the conclusion of this campaign came Stand & Deliver, Ant's autobiography, which he promoted with his first live performance in 11 years. Soon, Adam Ant began to mount a proper comeback, beginning a new label called Blueblack Hussar Ltd in 2010, then starting to perform with regularity, touring the U.K., Europe, U.S., and Australia as he began to work out new material. This new material finally surfaced in January 2013 as the messy, ambitious pseudo-concept album Adam Ant Is the BlueBlack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter. ‘Ant music for sex people’: Adam and the Ants live | Dangerous Minds ‘Ant music for sex people’: Adam and the Ants live 07.22.2014 Adam and the Ants Like Genesis and Ministry, Adam and the Ants had two distinct phases, each with fan bases that don’t always quite overlap 100%. Pre-1980, they were a raw, spiky post-punk band with sharp, fetishy lyrics.

Things changed quickly for them in 1980, when their manager, the infamous Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren, poached most of the band for a new project called Bow Wow Wow. But eviscerating the group proved not to be such a terrible idea. Singer Stuart “ Adam Ant ” Goddard continued with an entirely new band, and a major sound and image overhaul. On the presentation end, the band dove headlong into an embrace of the new romanticism, favoring an overwrought leather-pantsed-new-wave-pirate look which unaccountably struck people at the time as just absolutely dead sexy. Well, it actually DID look good on Ant. Most of the rest of the band just kinda looked goofy. Witness: On the musical end, the Ants adopted a distinctive dual-drum attack inspired by the Royal Drummers of Burundi, and, just as critically, enlisted Siouxsie and the Banshees’ founding guitarist Marco Pirroni, who’d become Ant’s co-songwriter and a major influence on the band’s direction just as it started to find wide fame.

This version of Adam and the Ants released Kings of the Wild Frontier and Prince Charming , both of which featured more sophisticated song craft than the band’s first iteration, and both of which ate the charts for breakfast. The single “Stand and Deliver,” for example, entered the UK charts at #1, and remained there for weeks. The band broke up in 1982, and Ant embarked on a solo career, but it was an in-name-only breakup, really, as the creative nexus of Ant and Pirroni remained together. In fact, Pirroni has contributed to every Adam Ant solo album, all the way up to one that came out last year . Live video of the first incarnation of Adam and the Ants is damnably difficult to find.

The most widely available representation of that period is the album Dirk Wears White Sox , released in 1979 in the UK, 1983 in the US (A Jack Sparrow-lookin’ Ant recently reunited with band members of that era to play the album in its entirety), but the best video I could dig up is this delightful miming along with “Plastic Surgery” from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: Here’s one that features their early manager Jordan singing the song “Lou,” and Adam Ant backing her on vocals for “ Puerto Rican .” When I sought live footage of the far better-known second version of the band, holy shit, motherlode. Search for them on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. Their visual presentation made them a sought-after act for televised music shows—and of course, the band’s early ‘80s heyday coincided with the launch of MTV, who couldn’t play their videos enough—but among the best footage I’ve found is this late 1981 show taped in Tokyo ( setlist ). I had always wondered if the distinctive vocal harmonies that featured prominently on their LPs were pulled off well in a live setting. Answer: actually not bad.

And then there’s this heavy performance of “Dog Eat Dog” in Manchester, 1980: When Kings of the Wild Frontier was released in America, Epic Records, probably sensing that they might have a HUGE new act on their hands—maybe even a teeny-bopper phenomenon—lowered the price of the album to just $3.99 at a time when most albums were in the $6.98 list price range. Between that, Solid Gold and MTV, Adam and the Ants soon became famous in the US as well. Here’s a contemporary documentary about the American Ants invasion that is tons of fun: <p> BIOGRAPHY 1977 May 1977, the newly formed band, The Ants perform for the first time in public at the ICA restaurant, The Mall in central London and are told to stop after performing just one song “Beat My Guest” in front of what was said to be a stunned audience. They continue their set in the ICA theatre, next door, before comedian John Dowie took to the stage.

The photographs below were taken during the restaurant performance and the subsequent theatre show, they were first published in Ant News Today issue 9 in 1987. The Ants followed this debut with a couple of shows in the basement of the Man in the Moon pub on Kings Road supporting X-Ray Spex before headlining their own show there on May 25th. It was after this last show that SEX shop assistant Jordan took on the role of manager for the band and also later as a part time vocalist during The Ants set for the song “Lou”. Soon afterwards, through Jordan’s contacts, Adam got involved in the film “Jubilee”. He was given the acting part of The Kid and the band got to play a version of the song “Plastic Surgery”, which was featured in the 1978 release of Derek Jarman’s film. The song is also included on the soundtrack album for the movie along with “Deutscher Girls”, (original version rather than the overdubbed lyric release from 1982).

It was to be the debut release for the band that would then be known as Adam and the Ants The band at this time featured Adam (vocals and occasional guitar), Andy Warren (bass), Dave Barbe (drums), Mark Ryan (guitar) and Jordan (vocals). They began to pound the gig circuit in their home ground of London playing such venues as The Vortex, The Roxy and the Marquee. They also started to get gigs out of the capital and played as far afield as Liverpool, Birmingham and Plymouth. By October Mark Ryan was out and John Beckett, who was to be known as Johnny Bivouac for the 7 months that he is was the band, took his place. For this change of band members The Ants are no more, the band were then to be called Adam and the Ants. By this time the production company for the film “Jubilee”, Megalovision, were organising things for the band. They managed to secure a three month residency at the infamous Marquee club on Wardour Street during November, December and into January 1978.

1978 Throughout the start of 1978 Adam and the Ants played around England building up a solid fan base. They also managed to record four songs (Puerto Rican, Deutscher Girls, It Doesn’t Matter & Lou) for the first of their three BBC Peel sessions for Radio 1 in January. After this they completed the tracks Plastic Surgery and Deutscher Girls, which were to be used for the Jubilee soundtrack album. In May they played at the Roundhouse in Camden supporting X Ray Spex. It was another major turnaround in the band’s career as it is the last show featuring Jordan on vocals and Johnny Bivouac on guitar. Shortly after this show auditions took place and 17 year old Matthew Ashman was enrolled as the new guitarist. He was thrown in at the deep end as within two months of joining the band they had recorded their second BBC Peel session (Zerox, Friends, You’re So Physical & Cleoptra) and had signed to Decca Records for a one year deal.

The deal with Decca produced a batch of demo recordings and the Adam and the Ants debut single; Young Parisians b/w Lady which was released in October and coincided with a short European tour successfully taking in Belgium, Germany and Italy. On their return to the UK, the band played a few shows around the UK before finishing with a 2 night residency at the Marquee club, the final time that they were to perform at the venue after having played a total of 14 times in just over a year. 1979 In January the band set out on their first full national tour; The Parisians Tour starting in Leeds and working their way around most of England and Wales over the next two months. In February the problems that had been brewing between the band and the record company came to a head and as a result they were released from their contract with Decca. The UK tour was finished with a few more dates spead around England and the following month saw them sell out the Lyceum Theatre in London, which at the time Adam and the Ants were now possibly the biggest and most popular unsigned act in the country. Two shows in Berlin followed before the band returned to London to rest and formulate plans for their future.

These plans were to sign with the Camden based “indie” label Do-it Records who put the Ants straight into Roundhouse Studios to record their next single, which was to be Zerox b/w Whip in my Valise. A series of adverts were printed in the UK music press to promote this release over a period of 5 weeks, each slowly uncovering details of the single before its release and culminating in full page spreads which included details of the forthcoming Zerox Tour in July. Following the tour, the band took on the major task of recording their debut album which was to be called Dirk Wears White Sox. August was spent in the studio with Adam also taking on the task of producing the LP which was eventually released in late November 1979 to a mixed reception. There was a lot of criticism in the press, which was nothing new for the band, and fans opinions varied, but whatever the case the album enjoyed a healthy long stay at the top of the independent charts in the UK which warranted subsequent pressings of the vinyl. After the album was recorded, Adam and the Ants effectively split up for a few months.

This left Adam and Dave to work on and record new material, re-enlist Matthew, bring Malcolm McLaren on board and eventually get Leigh Gorman in as a new bass player where they closed the year off with a show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. 1980 1980 would prove to be the most disruptive and eventually productive year to date for Adam as before January had been completed Malcolm McLaren, who had been paid for some temporary management advice, had in essence stolen Adam’s Ants in a coup that resulted in the band leaving to form Bow Wow Wow. Adam was distraught but within a few days, after contacting ex Models and Rema Rema guitarist Marco Pirroni, was back on his feet. The collaboration with Marco would end up as the longest-lasting and most fruitful working relationship that Adam would have and this started with a rewrite of the songCartrouble which would be the single to release Adam from the Do-it contract.

This recording session proved to be to thier benefit in more ways than one as the producer that Do-it records assigned was one Chris “Merrick” Hughes, who built up such a rapport with Adam and Marco that he was enlisted as the band’s permanent producer and also took on one of the drum positions along with ex-Model Terry Lee Miall. This left only a bass player to find, which they did shortly afterwards in the form of Kevin Mooney. With the new band complete they began to practice and write in earnest to show Malcolm, the ex-Ants, the industry that Adam and the Ants may have received a knock but they certainly weren’t out of the game. In April, the single, Kings of the Wild Frontier had been recorded and the following month the Ants Invasion Tour began its assault on the general public starting and finishing in their home town of London, the band played 15 shows in 18 days debuting a new set of songs along with some reworked favourites.

After the last night at the Empire Ballroom, record companies were stumbling over each other to get the band on their books, CBS were eventually the victors where they wasted no time in putting out the Kings single and then putting the band straight into the studio to record the album of the same name. Classic Tracks: Adam & The Ants ‘Stand & Deliver’ | Gamekeeper Turned Poacher Chris Hughes today. Having previously worked in retail for Virgin Records and drummed in New Wave band the Blitz Brothers, Hughes first entered the orbit of Adam & The Ants at the start of 1980, while doing editing work for Ian Tregoning, co-founder of the London-based indie label Do It Records, which had signed the Ants and released their post-punk debut album, 1979's Dirk Wears White Sox. On 24th January 1980, after Adam had recruited former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren to help broaden the Ants' commercial appeal, McLaren gutted the band as a result of drummer Dave Barbarossa, bassist Leigh Gorman and guitarist Matthew Ashman telling him they were fed up having no say in group decisions.

Having them back singer Annabella Lwin in a new outfit called Bow Wow Wow was akin to replacing Adam Ant and renaming his band. Yet, undaunted, Adam teamed up almost immediately with former Siouxsie & The Banshees, Models, Rema-Rema and Cowboys International guitarist Marco Pirroni, to spearhead a new Ants line-up. It was at around this time that Chris Hughes first encountered Adam Ant at the Do It Records offices, when handing Ian Tregoning the tape he'd been working on. "When Adam walked in and saw me,” Hughes recalls, "he said, 'If you think you're any fucking good, why don't you record us now? Marco and I have a new band and we're ready to go. We want to record some stuff. Don't piss about with that old stuff. Help us now.' He was really vehement, agitated and excited. My only production experience had been a bunch of recordings with a little-known Liverpool band called Dalek I Love You.

However, having drummed in bands since I was a kid, I knew what I was talking about musically when Adam and I chatted, and the truth of the matter is that he was desperate to get something recorded with his new band as soon as possible. So, within a week, we went to Rockfield, the famous residential studio in Wales, and recorded two tracks.” Featuring future Culture Club member Jon Moss on drums, so that Chris Hughes could focus on producing, these comprised 'Kick!' and a re-recording of the Dirk Wears White Sox track 'Cartrouble Pt 2'. Titled just 'Cartrouble' and released by Do It in March 1980 as a means of fulfilling the Ants' contract, this hit number one on the UK Independent Singles chart. "Within no time at all, there was a publishing deal in place and we did some gigs,” continues Hughes, referring to the 'Ants Invasion' UK tour that featured the new band line-up of Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, with Kevin Mooney on bass and both Hughes (performing under just his middle name, Merrick) and Terry Lee Miall on drums.

"Adam had asked me if I'd help him audition some drummers, and we found Terry Lee Miall, who was great. However, when Adam saw me demonstrating what certain drummers should do, he turned to me and said, 'Ah, fuck it, why don't you do it? Why don't you become part of the band?' So, in no time at all, I suddenly found myself producing and drumming! "I liked Adam immensely during that period. The great thing about him was he was so energetic and wanted to cover so much ground, he was very, very prepared to accept guidance in the studio. With so many other things on the go as his career took off, he responded to the organisation and common sense that I tried to offer, so it was a really good relationship. And the same applied to our live performances. I remember us playing the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square and packing that place without a record deal. Adam already had a big following on the post-punk scene.” Burundi Beat "We're the dandy highwaymen...” Clockwise from bottom: Adam Ant, Terry Lee Miall, Marco Pirroni, Chris Hughes and Gary Tibbs.

Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images It was still without the support of a label that the band's new lineup recorded 'Kings Of The Wild Frontier' in April 1980. Then, after this led to a contract with CBS, work on the album of the same name took place at Rockfield and London's Matrix Recording Studios. Topping the UK chart in January of the following year, this spawned hit singles in the form of 'Dog Eat Dog', 'Antmusic' and the title track. And it also marked a shift in musical styles from post-punk to New Wave, underpinned by the aforementioned Burundi drums. "When I'd first met Adam, a matter of days after he'd parted ways with the previous Ants line-up, he was very, very eager to enact some of the musical ideas that he'd discussed — and probably disagreed about — with Malcolm McLaren,” Hughes says. "The tribal sounds and image relating to warriors, pirates and Native Americans obviously came from those discussions, and when Adam mentioned a French album with Burundi drums, I told him I'd had that record for quite some time.

I was pretty familiar with the nature of Burundi rhythms — the carrier beat, the clicking sticks, shouting and chanting — so I basically understood what he was talking about, and I think it was a relief to him that he had someone who could actually help him make the kind of records he was interested in doing. "I remember Adam and Marco coming over to my house and us cutting the original demo to 'Kings Of The Wild Frontier' in my bedroom. That little demo had the Burundi carrier beat overlaid by all of the clacking guitars and the shouting, and we carried that concept through 'Antmusic', 'Dog Eat Dog' and a few other tracks that were successful on the second album. Then, while that record was selling very, very well, the decision was taken to come up with a new single. And that's why 'Stand & Deliver' was done between albums. It wasn't part of the recording sessions for the Prince Charming album on which it would end up.” Piece By Piece Meanwhile, bassist Kevin Mooney wasn't part of the recording sessions for 'Stand & Deliver'.

This was due to mounting tensions between the volatile Mooney and dictatorial Ant that boiled over during an February 1981 appearance in the Children's Royal Variety Show at the London Palladium, in front of Princess Margaret, the day before 'Stand & Deliver' was committed to tape at The Townhouse, with Alan Douglas engineering. "Kevin came into the Children's Royal Variety Performance in, let's say, a different head space to the rest of us and did his own thing,” Hughes recalls. "He looked incredible, but his look didn't have the stamp of approval from Adam. We were all in the dressing room, waiting to go on, and Kevin turned up looking amazing — in retrospect — but Adam was shocked by his appearance and his attitude. Still, we did the show in front of the Queen and the television cameras, and at one point Kevin just went off at even more of a tangent. Well, Adam was pretty pissed off with his performance, and when we went into the studio the next day to record 'Stand & Deliver' he — or Don Murfett, who was our manager — told me, 'Oh, Kevin won't be making this session'. He'd been asked to leave.

"This meant that, at this pivotal moment, there were just the four of us playing in the studio. Adam's a great bass player — he'd played bass in the first band he joined, Bazooka Joe — so he fulfilled that role on 'Stand & Deliver'. The song had been demo'd at Gus Dudgeon's studio, The Mill, which Jimmy Page subsequently bought, but there wasn't a lot of allocated time for us to record it at The Townhouse, as everything was moving very quickly, due to the success of 'Kings Of The Wild Frontier'. That's why, instead of rehearsing 'Stand & Deliver' and playing it as a band, we built it piece by piece — which Marco, Adam and I preferred in terms of control — and the result was half pop production and half chaos. "After I designed how the beat would go with Adam and Terry, the first thing we did was lay down a carrier beat from a [Keio Korg] Mini Pops Junior-type drum box, followed by bass and rhythm-guitar guides. After that, the four of us discussed whether the verse-bridge-chorus structure was right, whether a bit should be clipped off or another part should be extended.

However, as songwriters, Adam and Marco had most of that figured out and therefore kind of knew it led to a chorus at this point. We did adjust, add and edit bits, but essentially the song was at least 80 percent arranged in terms of the block structures. "The next thing to go down was a guide vocal, and after that there were two or three days of overdubbing some powerful guitar and a handful of my and Terry's drum tracks to build the whole thing up. I probably did a drum track first, then Terry and I did a drum track together, and that was the mainstay part that runs throughout the song. Not a loop, not samples, but eyes down and playing relentlessly. We didn't go out of time much; we just played to the drum box and guide bass part.” The Townhouse "The Townhouse's Studio One was fairly long and narrow, with a raised room at the back that had a stone wall, while the control room had a Helios desk, Studer 24-track machine and Eastlake monitors. We recorded some of the drums in the main studio, while Rototom overdubs were done in the stone room.

The Gretsch drum kit — which had a 1981 octagon badge — was miked with a Sennheiser MD421 on the tom toms, AKG 414 on the bigger toms, Electro-Voice RE10 on the snare, RE20 on the floor toms and bass drum, STC 4038 for overheads, AKG 451 on the hi-hat and also a Beyer M201 on toms and overheads. "Terry and I were mates — we got on very well very quickly and never had an argument, either in the studio or on tour — and he's a fantastic hard-hitter. If I needed muscle in the recording, he was terrifically robust and a great thumper. I, on the other hand, was much lighter, and that suited us brilliantly. Working together was a breeze. In certain cases, he'd say, 'Oh mate, you do this, you know what you're doing.' When I played alone on 'That Voodoo!' [for Prince Charming], he didn't sit there grumbling, 'Fuck it, what am I doing?' He was very cool about that.

He offered undying support, energy and creativity whether he was playing or not, so it was never an issue. "We played live together in concert, and during rehearsals we'd often arrive before everyone else or stay behind and figure out how a two-part thing might work. So our relationship was absolutely perfect and we never had a problem. I never pulled the production-decision rank with Terry. We'd just have an easy conversation because we always saw eye to eye on how things should be.” Marco Pirroni's favoured guitars were a Gibson Les Paul Junior, Les Paul TV and Gibson Firebird, each miked with a Neumann U87, and Chris Hughes describes him as "a fantastic guy. I absolutely adore him and I adore his guitar playing. He's really, really bright, knows all about the history of pop music, and a lot of his influence on the Kings Of The Wild Frontier and Prince Charming albums was the his take on '70s glam.

It wasn't about going headlong into synths and OMD and all that kind of angular '80s pop; it was actually the last vestige of Marco's and Adam's understanding of the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and, to some degree, Roxy Music, as well as early Elvis and Link Wray's 'Rumble'. While they had that kind of '70s thing going on, they were also advocating [The Stranglers'] 'No More Heroes', so there was this massive, wonderful contradiction. "The Ants' music was still guitars and amps and racket, and they weren't cut from the same cloth as the people who got into synths. "As a co-writer with Adam, Marco always had good ideas, and we kind of saw eye to eye and just got the work done. At the end of the day, the producer might have an overview and be good at managing and organising a session, but if the musicians are great, then they kind of know what's going on. "When Adam and Marco came in with a new idea, a new song, they'd sit and play it to me and then we'd discuss how to record it.

Their relationship had its ups and downs, and it's fairly well known that these days it's not on a good footing, but back then they were close mates and they just got on with it. For 'Stand & Deliver', I remember Adam and I watching Marco play some amazing, amazing guitar, and us looking at each other and going, 'Isn't he great?' He was standing there, absolutely in the moment, playing brilliantly. After that, we did some Rototom overdubs to build the track up.” Ant Music After the guide bass and rhythm guitar parts had been replaced — Adam Ant's Fender Telecaster being miked with a U87 microphone — his vocals were recorded last, with a combination of Neumann FET and valve U47s. "I'd usually comp from four or five lead takes,” Hughes explains. "If you haven't got it in five, then it's probably the wrong day. The only reason I'd comp Adam's performances was to get the best, most expressive parts. He could be quite impatient, but it was the impatience that's typical of anyone who's on to something. In that moment when you're on to something, you don't want it to be so elusive that you miss it.

So I think that level of impatience is very healthy. I've always loved it in artists, and I've never, ever said, 'Fucking hell, slow it all down.' That would be the kiss of death. "The key element here is to capture it all because you have a suspicion that at least 60 or 70 percent of it is bloody amazing. Sometimes I'd tell Adam, 'Mate, let's just have another go at this little bit because it's letting the thing down. The way you burst into the first verse was stunning, but you kind of run out of steam here, so let's just patch this bit up.' It was an easy-going approach and he was fine about doing whatever it took to make something better. "You have to remember, another reason for Adam's impatience was that he had a lot on his plate — doing magazine, TV and radio interviews while designing album covers and flying all over the place — and by the time the band split he was exhausted. We all were. He was also showing signs of the sort of fatigue that led him to be a bit less balanced.

However, tension, egocentricity and over-excitement happen with any successful band, and at that time none of us could envision how things would unfortunately develop with Adam. Certainly, he was tense some of the time, as well as overworked and over-excited, but being that we were successful, it all felt good. Nobody looked at it like it was a big problem and upsetting condition. It just seemed to be par for the course. We were all over-excited and doing our bit. "Quite often my relationship with him was hilarious. We'd be cutting a track, he'd be trying to do a vocal, and if I said, 'Adam, perhaps we can just try this bit again,' all of a sudden he could turn into Sean Connery, going 'Aye, Chris, I agree,' in Connery's voice. It was piss-funny and we'd have a great time. If he was doing a bass part and got a bit wrong, I'd say, 'We can drop in here,' and he'd be fine with that.

On the road, our relationship was much more perfunctory; we'd all turn up, we'd rehearse, we'd play, we'd do great gigs, we'd do TV and we were political safe bets. Nobody tried to force their own agenda. "Whenever an interviewer talked to us about the internal workings of the band, we were always a close family. We supported Adam, loved what he was doing, and played our part in that bubble as well as we could, whereas in the studio it was a little bit different because we were collaborating on a recording. On 'Stand & Deliver', Terry, Marco and mainly Adam did all of the backing vocals and chants, and Adam was absolutely brilliant. He had quirky harmonies that he'd kind of half worked out, and as usual they turned out to be great. He'd say, 'Just give me another track, Chris, give me another track,' whenever he had another musical idea, and although it was undisciplined, he just wanted to get it done before he'd forget it.

He was incredibly creative.” While Danny Kleinman stood in for Kevin Mooney during a 17th February '81 TV appearance on the BBC's Jim'll Fix It, former Roxy Music bassist Gary Tibbs joined Adam & the Ants as a full-time fixture on 9th March. Three days later, he then took part in the shoot for the iconic 'Stand & Deliver' video at Hatfield House, featuring Mr Ant as the 'dandy highwayman' who is rescued from the gallows by his trusty band members. Nevertheless, as Chris Hughes points out, "During the three or four months when we recorded the Prince Charming album at AIR on [London's] Oxford Street with Ross Cullum engineering, Adam still wanted to play bass on lots of bits and pieces. He didn't let go of the reins and say, 'Take it away'. Quite rightly, he kept a tight grip on how he wanted things. "I think Adam considered Gary to be a great bass player.

We were all huge Roxy Music fans, and having heard that he had come off the road with the Roxys, was available to tour and could essentially do the time, we knew he'd be talented enough and experienced enough to slot in with the rest of us. On day one he walked in, picked up the parts and knew what he was doing, so it was a breeze in that respect. He played his part professionally like we all did, we had plenty of laughs and it was a lot of fun.” Fa Diddly Qua Qua Fa Diddly Qua Qua After Adam Ant decided to disband the Ants, he recorded his first solo album, 1982's Friend Or Foe, in conjunction with Marco Pirroni and Chris Hughes, and this included his first transatlantic hit, 'Goody Two Shoes', which topped the UK chart and climbed to number 12 in the US. "I played the drums for that song on a riser in the middle of Abbey Road's Studio One,” Hughes recalls. "I did two takes from beginning to end and the second was the one that we kept.

I just powered through it and the basis of 'Goody Two Shoes' was recorded very quickly: Adam on bass, Marco on guitars, me on the drum track. Then we took it to The Townhouse for the overdubs.” Still, it is 'Stand & Deliver' that today remains Adam & The Ants' best-selling single, and this had as much to do with the band's attitude in the studio while riding the success of Kings Of The Wild Frontier as it had to do with the nature of Ant and Pirroni's composition. "We were confident going in to make that record,” asserts Chris Hughes, who'd subsequently co-write Tears For Fears' 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World' and produce their first two albums, The Hurting and Songs From The Big Chair, in addition to working with artists ranging from Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant and Jon Bon Jovi to Wang Chung, Tori Amos, Electric Soft Parade and the Tearjerkers. He currently runs his own Helium records label, publishing company and Internet radio station. "We knew what we were doing and we knew what we wanted,” Hughes continues.

"So, it was less like 'Ooh fuck, I hope this works,' and more like 'We know how we want it to sound and that's what we're gonna get'. You can't predict if a record's going to do well, but you can predict if it'll be any good, and I definitely knew that 'Stand & Deliver' had all the right ingredients.” Adam & The Ants | Download Music, Tour Dates & Video | eMusic Adam & The Ants Rate It! Avg: 4.0 (57 ratings) Born: London, England Biography All Music Guide All Music Guide: One of the seminal figures of new wave, Adam Ant (born Stuart Leslie Goddard) had several distinct phases to his career. Initially, he explored a jagged, guitar-oriented post-punk with his group Adam and the Ants before giving way to a more pop-oriented, glam-tinged musical direction that brought him to the top of the charts. After that had run its course, he refashioned himself as a mainstream singer, which enabled him to stretch his career out for a couple of years.

Once it seemed that his musical career had evaporated, he made an unexpected comeback in the early '90s as an adult alternative artist. During all this time, he recorded several great pop singles and had a surprisingly large impact on alternative rock. Adam Ant formed Adam and the Ants with guitarist Lester Square, bassist Andy Warren, and drummer Paul Flanagan in London in 1977. The group's approach was more theatrical than most punk groups, incorporating sadomasochistic imagery into their concerts. During this time, the group's lineup was fairly unstable, with Square being replaced by Mark Gaumont. The band released their debut, Dirk Wears White Sox, on the independent label Do It in 1979.

Dirk was an ambitious and somewhat dark album, filled with jerky rhythms and angular guitar riffs, and elements of glam rock crept into Adam's vocals; Adam re-acquired the rights to the record in 1983, reissuing it in a resequenced and remixed form, with the tracks "Catholic Day" and "Day I Met God" replaced by "Zerox" and "Kick," as well as including a new version of "Cartrouble." At the time of its release, Dirk Wears White Sox wasn't a critical or commercial success, and the band felt the need to rework their image. Ant hired Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, to help redefine them. McLaren dressed the band in pirate outfits and suggested a more accessible and pop-oriented, rhythmic variation on punk. Adam and the Ants followed his advice, preparing material for a new album. However, McLaren persuaded all of the Ants to leave Adam, using them as the core members of Bow Wow Wow. Adam Ant immediately formed a new version of the Ants, adding guitarist Marco Pirroni, bassist Kevin Mooney, and drummers Terry Lee Miall and Merrick (born Chris Hughes).

Pirroni, in particular, became very important in the band's musical direction, co-writing the majority of the songs with Adam, thus beginning a collaboration between the duo that would continue into the '90s. Driven by a relentless, driving beat and chanting melodies, the new band's first album, 1980's Kings of the Wild Frontier, became an enormous hit in the U.K., launching three Top Ten hit singles, including the number two "Ant Music." The band's success was helped by a series of visually enticing videos, prominently featuring the skinny, handsome Adam Ant decked out in pirate gear. Prince Charming, released the following year, retained the same formula as Kings of the Wild Frontier, spawning two number one singles, "Stand and Deliver" and "Prince Charming." Even though the album was a commercial success, the formula was beginning to wear thin. After Prince Charming, Adam Ant ditched the Ants for a solo career, retaining Marco Pirroni as a songwriting collaborator and a supporting musician. Adam's first solo album, Friend or Foe, was released in 1982 and featured the number one single "Goody Two Shoes" and the Top Ten title track.

Although his next album, 1983's Strip, had some highlights and hit singles, it marked the end of his reign as one of Britain's top pop stars. Released in 1985, the Tony Visconti-produced Vive le Rock had some fun moments, but the performance was too studied and the record didn't earn any hit singles, so Adam Ant pursued a surprisingly successful career in acting. In 1990, Ant made a comeback with the catchy hit single "Room at the Top" from the Manners & Physique record, but the album failed to produce another hit single. For the next five years, Ant concentrated on acting. By the time Adam Ant returned to recording in 1995, echoes of his music could be heard in the spiky singles of Elastica, the neo-goth industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails, and the pseudo-glam of Suede. Instead of capitalizing on the burgeoning new wave revival, Adam Ant's 1995 comeback, Wonderful, had little to do with the stylish, intensely rhythmic music he made in the early '80s.

Instead, the album repositioned him as a more mature pop-rocker, with crafted songs that featured acoustic guitars as prominently as electrics. The album was a moderate hit in the U.S. and the U.K., as was the single "Wonderful." Following the promo push for Wonderful, Adam Ant and Pirroni attempted to write a new clutch of songs but no finished album came of it, nor did anything surface from various sessions over the next few years. Instead, the rarities-studded retrospective Antbox appeared in 2000. Ant continued his attempts to launch new projects -- including a collaboration with Morrissey guitarist Boz Boorer, who did appear on Wonderful -- but he also suffered from erratic behavior, resulting in several arrests between 2002 and 2003, leading to a period of hospitalization for mental health (he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder). A further round of reissues arrived in the mid-2000s, this time expanded double-discs of his first six albums, all containing a second disc with rarities, B-sides, and unreleased material.

At the conclusion of this campaign came Stand & Deliver, Ant's autobiography, which he promoted with his first live performance in 11 years. Soon, Adam Ant began to mount a proper comeback, beginning a new label called Blueblack Hussar Ltd in 2010, then starting to perform with regularity, touring the U.K., Europe, U.S., and Australia as he began to work out new material. This new material finally surfaced in January 2013 as the messy, ambitious pseudo-concept album Adam Ant Is the BlueBlack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter.

Question: What was the name of Adam and the ants first album called?
Answer: Dirk Wears White Sox